Eternity
by AnnCarter
Summary: The Doctor already lives a lifetime in the blink of an eye. When time slows down, he lives eternity. (Set in the end of Big Finish's second Tenth Doctor audiobook, Time Reaver, so don't read if you haven't listened!)


_"Eternity. I hear you calling. But you will not have me yet."_

 ** _-The Doctor (Time Reaver)_**

* * *

He was floating.

It felt like the day he looked into the Untempered Schism, a child at the age of eight, barely old enough to make his own choices or know what he wants, not even old enough to be able to handle the tiniest portion of time and space. The Time Lords never saw it that way; for them, if a child was incapable of handling the Schism, he wasn't capable of becoming a Time Lord. The academy wasn't for him.

That day had to have been one of the most horrible days of his life. The experience was never easy for anyone, but for him, it was horrifying. Looking into that tiny tear in the fabric of time and space, seeing the entire Time Vortex, _feeling eternity_ … it was more than he could take.

He ran, and just like he told Jack and Martha, he hasn't stopped since.

Being a Time Lord was never easy. In every second of his existence, he lived a lifetime. Where everyone around him saw a choice, he saw an infinite number of different futures. Where others felt the burden of their life, he felt the burden of the universe. He saw everything, every second – everything that was, everything that could be. Everything that is. Everything that mustn't ever be.

That was all he had left now.

He knew it wouldn't be long. Well, not in comparison to _his_ life. Donna – or anyone else around him, for that matter – would never have been able to survive this. Being shot by twenty-two Time Reavers – that was almost too much even for him. Almost.

Time was already moving slowly enough for him beforehand.

And now he was floating, or falling, or maybe staying put. It didn't matter; he couldn't feel his body anyway. All that remained was his mind.

His endless, yet overly-crowded consciousness. Eleven different minds, all trapped inside his head. All the Doctors he used to be – and hints of all the Doctors he was going to become. They were echoes, ghosts of possible futures, but he could still hear them inside his head. He could _feel_ them.

It felt like it's been years. Years and years; decades and decades; centuries and centuries. It's been centuries since he shot himself with those guns; centuries of living inside his head and facing everything he's been trying to run away from. It was never the Daleks or the Time Lord; it was always him, the things in his mind, the memories and thoughts he wanted to escape. That was always the reason he kept running.

It wasn't really centuries, but it felt like that.

He lost everyone over and over and over again. He remembered everything over and over and over again. He made promises and broke them; loved people and gave up on them; ran away when he needed to stop and face his nightmares. He made the same mistakes again, and even though in the back of his head he knew it _wasn't real_ , it still burnt him the way he did when it was.

He wondered if he ever grew up and ran away, or everything that's happened was inside his head, and he was still the same eight-year-old boy who was looking at the Untempered Schism.

 _It would wear off,_ his mind argued. _Soon enough, it would wear off. Time would go normally again. It's not much longer now._

It didn't feel like that. It felt as though it would never end.

It felt like looking into eternity again.

But he couldn't give up, could he? Donna needed him. And he needed Donna, even more than he'd like to admit. She was one of his closest friends, and right now, she needed him. They all needed him.

He's made so many mistakes. So many things wrong. So much of his life was filled with these pain and despair. But there was more to his life than that, no matter how easy it was for him to fall back to that place. There were planets, and adventures, and friends, and happiness. There was a hero, deep down, within him.

That hero couldn't give up.

 _It would wear off,_ He agreed, fighting everything he didn't want to remember. _Soon enough, it would end. Everything would go back to normal. Soon enough, I'll be able to run again._

Until then, he was going to fight. Eternity wasn't going to have him. Not just yet.


End file.
